Articles

This is writing by Hub Meeker, a retired journalist and crisis line counsellor.  Hub volunteered for over 20 years at the NEED crisis and information line, now defunct due to budget cuts within the Vancouver Island Health Authority.  By posting this, I hope this provides the wide world a perspective of what it is like… Read more

Diego posted a link to Matt Might’s article “The Illustrated Guide to a PhD“, which was funny, sad, and many would think is accurate.  Since I feel optimistic today, I would like to extend on that with an encouraging note. While we’re all familiar with “perfect” objects, like a circle, triangle, or square: …they’re not… Read more

Having taught spectroscopy for several years, I find that students commonly have a hard time prioritizing IR bands in their spectra interpretation.  After several false starts and long years of procrastination, here’s a pictorial guide that I hope would be clear, accurate, and helpful for learning to interpret IR spectra.  If you wish to use… Read more

There’s at least a dozen chemical structure editors running under different kinds of licenses and platform, and (ugh) none of them are truly satisfactory.  The latest one I’ve checked out is ChemDoodle, which is somewhat new and have some good things going on.  The existing reviews on the Net dates to 2004/5, so a fresh… Read more

The past few weeks I’ve been greatly distracted while writing. Trying to build a supporting app for my dissertation and the inertia kick from chemdoodle web components brought me to learning Java / JavaScript. I’ve known for sometime that I need to learn web-dev for OpenChemArt (amongst other things), but haven’t put serious thoughts into… Read more

Backstory: five years ago I signed myself up for a SCUBA diving course. At the first class there is a swim test: 200m, and treading water for 10min. I splashed and gurgled my way through the swim, then sank and drowned. Twice, and barely survived on the third trial. “That’s awful, dude”, I said to… Read more